Sustainable Forest Management in a Mediterranean region: Social preferences

Abstract

Aim of study: There is a lack of empirical research that deals with sustainable forest management in Mediterranean regions, among the most vulnerable ecosystems. The main purpose of this work is to define the strategic criteria and objectives for sustainable forest management and aggregate the preferences of stakeholders in a Mediterranean region, using AHP and Goal Programming.Area of study: Valencian Community (Spain).Material and Methods: Firstly, we identified forest stakeholders and structured a decision hierarchy. Then a workshop was carried out to test and validate the proposed criteria and objectives, as well as a survey to determine social preferences. Secondly, another survey was conducted amongst experts to prioritize action plans.Main results: Stakeholders’ preferences gave the greatest importance to the environmental criteria (hydrological regulation and erosion, climate change mitigation and biodiversity) with an average weight of 40%. Social criteria (employment, recreational activities and landscape) had a weight of 38% and 22% the economic criteria case (wood, hunting and fishing, livestock, renewable energies, rural tourism and mining). The results showed that new products and services such as tourism, renewable energies, landscape, hydrological regulation and erosion control, biodiversity or climate change mitigation are very relevant objectives. We also prioritized action plans comparing them with the distribution of the administration budget.Research highlights: The environmental and social criteria are much more important than the economic ones in the regional planning of the Mediterranean forest, regardless of the method used to aggregate the social preferences and if the forest is public or private.Key words: Multiple Criteria Decision Making; Goal Programming; Analytic Hierarchy Process; Preferences Aggregation.

The economic value of landscape aesthetics in Albufera natural park through the analytic multicriteria valuation method

“…AHP, the method developed by Saaty [29], which has been broadly used in different fields [30][31][32][33], is implemented to obtain the relative weights of the TEV components, while DCF [34] is used to determine the economic values of the services associated with DUV.…”

Livelihood Economic Activities Causing Deforestation in Northern Ghana: Evidence of Sissala West District

“…Unsustainable forest resource exploitation, especially in developing countries for economic growth, has contributed to global warming, climate change, health issues, poor yield and extinction of certain plant and animals species [6]. Studies have shown that deforestation continuously triggers drought and dry spell issues in most part of Africa hence threatening food security and poverty alleviation on the continent [7].…”

Assessment of Ecosystem Services Based on Multiple Criteria and Group Decision Making

“…AHP could also be useful to select and prioritise strategic alternatives in the management of ESS, by using pairwise comparison of the performance of alternatives in relation to every ESS. However, empirical studies have shown that only the most expert stakeholders are capable of meeting the consistency requirement of the method when comparing alternatives with respect to technical performances (Maroto et al, 2013). Thus, AHP is advisable for selecting and ranking alternatives when there are no data available for the indicators for ESS.…”

“…Ecosystem maintenance is the priority function, being a result consistent with the previous regional studies. Products from forests, mainly timber, have little relevance due to the slow regenerative capacity of the Mediterranean forests (Maroto et al, 2013).…”

“…Nevertheless, this perspective does not provide tools to manage all ESS, including environmental, provisioning and cultural services. In particular, it is necessary to develop research focused on the non-market benefits of ESS, decision making and public opinion in natural resource management, as shown in previous studies (Petrokofsky et al, 2010;Maroto et al, 2013;.…”